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Nationalism As a Contingent Event: Som Ereflections on the Ethio-Eriterean Experience

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Nationalism As a Contingent Event: Som Ereflections on the Ethio-Eriterean Experience Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU International Conference on African Center for African Development Policy Development Archives Research 8-2001 Nationalism as a Contingent Event: Som eReflections on the Ethio-Eriterean Experience Mesfin Araya City University of New York (CUNY) Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/africancenter_icad_archive Part of the African Studies Commons, and the Economics Commons WMU ScholarWorks Citation Araya, Mesfin, "Nationalism as a Contingent vE ent: Som eReflections on the Ethio-Eriterean Experience" (2001). International Conference on African Development Archives. 8. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/africancenter_icad_archive/8 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for African Development Policy Research at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in International Conference on African Development Archives by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact wmu- [email protected]. NATIONALISM AS A CONTINGENT EVENT: SOME REFLECTIONS ON ETHIO-ERITREAN EXPERIENCE* Mesfin Araya * This paper is a bare outline of a larger manuscript near completion. Dr. Mesfin Araya is a professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of its Research Center at York College, CUNY. Background What is politically significant and what really attracts scholarly research in any nationalism is the awakening of the masses - i.e. the effective transition from elite-based to mass- based nationalism; this study is concerned with that transition in the Eritrean experience in the modern political history of Ethiopia. Eritrea is a multi-ethnic society comprising eight linguistic groups, but historically, the great cultural and political divide has been religion - with roughly equal population distribution between Christians and Moslems. From 1890-1941, the region was an Italian colony; with the collapse of the Italian empire in the Horn of Africa, it was "administered" by the British until 1952, when it joined Ethiopia under a "federal" arrangement, sponsored by the United Nations; with the collapse of the "federation" in 1962, Eritrea became a province of Ethiopia; In April 1993, however, it reemerged as a new nation-state: the referendum, sponsored by the United Nations, is said to have resulted in 99.8 percent vote for Independence; the birth of the new nation-state has radically redrawn the post-colonial African map, held sacred by the members of the Organization of African Unity. The checkered political history of the tiny former Italian colony, British protectorate, autonomous region, province of Ethiopia, and finally a new nation-state, seems to raise interesting theoretical questions to the student of nations, nationhood, and nationalism: when (conceptualized in historical perspective), how, and why, did the Eritrean nationhood become a reality? Was the reality of Eritrean nationhood a thing that developed or a contingent historical event? How deeply rooted and solid is Eritrean national identity? At a more general level: What is Nationalism? Is its dynamics inherently governed by the qualities of cultural group identities, or is it primarily a product of enduring socio-economic forces, entailed by modernity? What does the Eritrean experience in the modern political history of Ethiopia suggest? I was motivated to explore the Eritrean experience in the modern political history of Ethiopia by the difficulties I encounter in two areas: the theoretical debate about nations, nationhood, and nationalism, and the specific scholarly literature on Eritrean nationalism. This study has two goals: as an investigation of a specific historical case study, it attempts to offer some insights to the ongoing theoretical discussions about nationalism; also, it tries to present fresh interpretation that claims to provide corrective measures to existing literature on Eritrean nationalism. Framework of Analysis The proliferation of nationalist struggles has given rise to a flurry of activity in theory concerning nations, nationhood and nationalism. Yet nationalism, as an object of scholarship, remains elusive, "puzzling about which there is less analytical consensus… Disagreement about its origins is matched by uncertainty about its future." (Anderson, 1996:1) Nationalist movements create, invoke, conjure up, nations where they do not exist to justify, legitimize their claims; hence, nationalist struggle is seen as the unfolding spirit of the nation, and the nationalists see themselves as the carrier of that spirit. Having, therefore, a necessary functional role, the idea, nation, is inherent to the practice of nationalists. That historical truth need not be surprising. What remains surprising is that the practical discourse of nationalist movements seems to have influenced the theoretical discussions about nations, nationhood, and nationalism. As Rogers Brubaker aptly describes - most theoretical discussions about nationalism are indeed discussions of nations. 1 To elaborate my argument and reformulate the analytical framework adopted in this study, let me outline the perspectives of two dominant schools of thought - continuum and modernist. The first is popularly associated with Anthony Smith; although Smith (1986:16) does not deny the modern character of Nationalism, he nevertheless, perceives "Ethnie" as the seed of nations. Although the specific emphasis may vary, a number of scholars - e.g. John Armstrong (1982), Walker Connor (1994), and John Hutcheson (1994) -- belong to the Continuum school of thought, whose central thesis is continuity between a pre-existing, enduring, sense of group ethnic/cultural identity and nationalism. There are even those, like Connor, who suggest that every ethnic group is a potential political candidate for nationhood, apparently implying the likelihood of the disintegration of multi-ethnic societies such as post-colonial Africa. Shared myths, cultural symbols, or ethnic identity, can indeed have a powerful catalyst role in nationalist politics, but the dynamics of nationalism is not inherently, necessarily, governed by the properties of cultural group identities (Brubaker 1996). Indeed there are concrete historical cases that such a theoretical perspective could hardly explain. There are societies with strong cultural solidarity but weak nationalist politics - e.g. Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Kurds, Scots, Sikhs, Tibetans, and Welsh, who have failed to produce their own nation-states; the collapse of the Somalia nation-state is even more a vivid example of the non- historical correspondence between the so-called "ethnie" and nationalism. Even among those who may be seen as having shared myths and cultural symbols, there was clear historical variation; as historians would tell us, most individuals nationalities in the Hapsburg monarchy did not begin to yearn for a separate state until late nineteenth century; nor did the Polish produce their own nation-state until 1918. We also encounter in history societies with weak cultural solidarity but strong nationalist politics, nevertheless: the nation-states born out of the anti-colonial nationalism in Africa - where culture, ethnic, or linguistic heterogeneity was the rule - are indeed good historical examples. The second school of thought, identified as modernist, invariably invokes enduring socio- political and economic structural forces - social communications (Deutsch 1966), the modern state (Michael Mann 1975:44-64), industrialism (Gellner 1983), print capitalism (Anderson 1991), unequal regional development (Narin 1977) -associated with modernity to account for nationalism. But such a theoretical perspective has also its own inadequacies. There are those, for example, who cite French nationalism without industrialization to counter argue that historically nationalism emerged in the absence of modernity; 2 nor do nations effortlessly follow from modernity; in his prominent historical, sociological, and comparative, study of small- county nationalist movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Miroslav Hroch (1985) has strongly underlined what the modernist school of thought is totally indifferent to: the historical variability of world-timing among those nationalist movements. What is even more - as Lia Greenfeld (1992), in her comparative historical study, strongly shows -- modernity may actually be the product of nationhood rather than vice versa. The modernist perspective may be helpful to account for ethnic elite alienation, and hence the rise of elite-based nationalism - but it fails to specify the conditions, or the historical events, that effect the transition to mass-based 1 nationalism: the vital question of when, how, and why, does the nationalist entrepreneur's' construction of nation come to captivate the masses is visibly missing in the theoretical formula of the modernist Those two schools of thought - despite their difference in perspective - actually seem to fall into a single school of thought: developmentalist perspective, as both treat nationalism as a product of underlying, enduring, cultural (continuum approach) or socio-political and economic (modernist approach) forces; as a result, both render the concept nation - which is inherent to the practice of nationalists - a reified analytical status - the idea, nation, conceptualized as an entity that needs to be defined, as a thing out there that develops 3 -- and as Brubaker (1996) rightly notes -- it is not a mere coincidence that the theoretical
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